26 Priceless Herbert A. Simon Quotes

Nov 19, 2016

Herbert A. Simon is a Nobel Prize laureate and American political scientist and computer scientist that wrote almost a thousand publications in his time. Considered to be one of the most influential social scientists in the 20th century, Simon left quite a legacy in his time. Here is a look at some of the most memorable Herbert A. Simon quotes you want to be familiar with.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

“Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.”

“By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.”

“Creativity is no less challenging or exciting when the mystery is stripped from the creative process. The most beautiful flowers grow under careful cultivation from common soil.”

“Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent – not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design.”

“Human beings know a lot of things, some of which are true, and apply them. When we like the results, we call it wisdom.”

“Human knowledge has been changing from the word go and people in certain respects behave more rationally than they did when they didn’t have it. They spend less time doing rain dances and more time seeding clouds.”

“I don’t care how big and fast computers are, they’re not as big and fast as the world.”

“Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognize surprising and unusual phenomena.”

“Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.”

“Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.”

“Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.”

“One finds limits by pushing them.”

“One of the first rules of science is if somebody delivers a secret weapon to you, you better use it.”

“Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”

“The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be – how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.”

“The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.”

“The proper study of mankind is the science of design.”

“The simplest scheme of evolution is one that depends on two processes; a generator and a test. ”

“The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

“The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the ‘hard’ sciences so brilliantly successful.”

“The task of the generator is to produce variety, new forms that have not existed previously, whereas the task of the test is to cull out the newly generated forms so that only those that are well fitted to the environment will survive.”

“The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring – but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.”

“Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and restraints.”

Check out this video of Herbert A. Simon as he goes about laying the foundations to some of the most the technologically advanced concepts such as artificial intelligence and beyond.

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